Browser gpu decoding hd4000 series

[sbraz]

heyoo first post.

i have a fairly old laptop from a friend here on my desk, a dual core athlon with an a radeon 4000 series gpu.

i already shoved mint 19 on it, finally hoping for some good amdgpu h264 video decoding for youtube but it’s not working on chrome and i read it’s been completely disabled.

i lost myself in countless threads saying to do this and that but other than confusing me even more i’ve decided to come here looking for help: is there any way to get browser gpu video decoding on linux on a such old gpu, keeping in mind that i don’t want it to break every 4 months? switching to a different browser isn’t a problem.

thanks!

[catsay]

I’m guessing by HD 4000 you mean the ATi Radeon HD4000 series. I also have an ATi Radeon HD4890 2GB in a test system on the side here.

If so h264 decoding is possible with that via VA-API for mesa.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_acceleration

So first run vainfo in a terminal and post what it prints out. If it’s not available you might have to install va-api/libva for radeon mesa.

This is what you should see if hardware video decoding is supported:

Ignore the x-server comment, i just quickly ran that command over ssh.

Now the first thing that has to be said is that, linux & chromium/ chrome on linux is not particularly straight forward with hardware accelerated video decoding.

If you visit the youtube.com/html5 video page you should see something like this:

If you can confirm for me that all those boxes are ticked blue then we can continue.

PS: Gentle reminder since it’s your first post, try to provide as much detail as possible at the start of a forum post asking for help.

See this thread as guide:

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Welcome to the L1 Community

[sbraz]

yes, radeon 4000 series, sorry for the confusion.

mesa va-api packages are already installed and vainfo shows something very similar to your screenshot.

the html5 player page on chrome reports h264 as good, vp8-9 are disabled because of the extension “h264ify”. this is on purpose to force gpu decoding.

while watching 1080 content cpu spikes up to 70-100% constantly (top reports chrome being the utilizer).

when enabling “Override software rendering list”, chrome://gpu reports gpu decoding being enabled but in chrome://media-internals instead i still see “FFmpegVideoDecoder” instead of what i normally see “GpuVideoDecoder”.

stats for nerds reports h264 being the codec in use.

radeontop reports something like 30% utilization during playback in all cases.

thanks!